How to clone a Vista/W2K disk to a new Vista-only disk.

I want to clone from a hard drive with a W2K/Vista dual boot over to a new hard drive with only the one Vista bootable partition. How do I do this with True Image 11?

More info:

I have True Image and I want to clone the present 300 gb drive that has, in order, a 10 gb FAT32 system partition with W2K (active primary), followed by a 40 GB system partition NTFS with Vista (boot primary), then a 250 gb Data NTFS (primary). I want to clone only the Vista and the Data partitions.

How do I use True Image to clone only the Vista and the Data partitions? I have Vista working fine with all my software and no longer feel that I want the W2K partition. Unfortunately the W2K partition is the first area on the hard disk. Deleting it has not been possible so far.

On closer reading of your response to my post about selective partition cloning, you wanted to know what the drive letters were upon booting from W2K. The W2K partition has the C drive letter. Acronis True Image is on that drive, too. I launched it and tried to clone only the Vista partition. It stubbornly wanted to put all the current partitions onto the new drive. I still cannot clone just one partition.

Sorry for the incomplete reading of your request for drive letter assignment on booting to W2K.

The order of the partitions is taken from the disk management plugin in the computer management snapin.

Thanks everyone for following this. I tried to get screenshots of the drive layout into this reply, but no go. Images have to be somewhere on the net and it didn't seem worth while fooling with that for the simple info you requested.

You can use forum member MudCrab's guide for separating Vista and XP. It should be close enough to allow you to untangle the boot files for Windows 2k from those of Vista.

After you get Vista and W2k untangled and Vista booting on its own you would do the following:

1. Delete all of the partitions on your new target hard disk. Use the Vista DVD or a W2k CD to do this, or if you have partitioning software, use it.
2. Create an image of your Vista and "Main" partitions from the existing source disk. Don't include the W2k partition in the image. Save this image to an external hard disk.
3. Disconnect the source hard disk and install the target hard disk in its place.
4. Boot from the Acronis CD and restore the saved image to the new hard disk. If you select one partition at a time in the restore wizard then you will get a resize screen that will let you choose the desired size of the target partitions, so you can make them larger.

You can't use the Acronis "Clone" function because it copies one disk to another and will include the unwanted W2k partition.

keep in mind that you may have do repair of windows. vista is nasty about moving from disk to disk. documentation can be easily found by googling.

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Yes, gparted does partition operations pretty well, but remember that the OP has a dual-boot system with Vista's boot files on the Win2k partition and Vista on another partition and that the boot files have to be moved to the Vista partition before deleting the W2k partition, if that's what you are suggesting. A partition tool isn't needed if TI is used to back up/restore the Vista partition from one disk to another, but it's good to have such a tool in your digital toolbox.

The repair of Windows won't be necessary if you follow the article that I referenced in post #9.

I finally failed in getting my new hard disk vista32 to proceed beyond a "wait while setting up desktop" type of message. The links in the post were complete. I partitioned the new hard disk and set the first partition to be active. Then I backed up my old Vista partition using Acronis from W2K (my old drive dual booted W2K and Vista 32). Then I returned to Vista to use Acronis to load the backed up files onto the new partition on the new drive. The file numbers in old and new vista partitions were identical.

Then I disconnected the old drive and followed Mudcrab's tutorial on restoring a boot drive. When I booted the new drive, it worked. The vista blip appeared. But the desktop failed to organize itself. Question: since all the files were identical between old and new vista partitions, and the new installation did not proceed to run the vista desktop, had Microsoft done something to prevent copying working vista partitions? If so, sector-by-sector cloning would be one solution. Backups, in my current experience, probably need to be tested before assuming they will work when needed. Cloning, or ghosting, drives is probably a better way to go. I could not do this from Acronis without also cloning the partition I did not want on the new drive. I hit a dead end.

The upshot is my decision to just stay with my old vista installation. I will use the new drive for the video production that initiated this project.

Thanks to everyone here for your inspiration and excellent information.

...The vista blip appeared. But the desktop failed to organize itself. Question: since all the files were identical between old and new vista partitions, and the new installation did not proceed to run the vista desktop, had Microsoft done something to prevent copying working vista partitions?...

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No, Microsoft didn't do anything to prevent copying partitions. You're really close now. The only problem remaining is that Vista assigned itself the wrong drive letter on first boot (it probably should be C.

If you're inclined, you can fix this. Once the drive letter is correct, Vista should complete the boot process and you should see the normal desktop from the image that was copied. There are multiple ways to repair the drive letter. Here is one way:

1. Disconnect all except the new Vista disk
2. Boot Vista and wait for it to create a temporary desktop (you are running from a temporary user profile at this point).
3. Start Task Manager by right-clicking on the taskbar
4. From Task Manager's menu, choose File, New Task
5. Type regedit to run the registry editor
6. Navigate to HKEY_Local_Machine\System\MountedDevices
7. Delete all of the entries in the right pane except for the first (Default) entry
8. Reboot your machine

Vista should then assign itself the C: drive letter and your previous user profile should load and run correctly.